The recently held Pour Oregon is an annual wine event you should put on your calendar if you are a lover of Oregon wines. The Pour Oregon wine tasting was held on Sunday, April 29th at Castaway Portland near Montgomery Park in NW Portland and attracted nearly 500 eager wine tasters served by over 40 small production wineries from all corners of the state of Oregon.
The space at Castaway was laid out in geographic related pods of 4 or 5 wineries. The Willamette Valley had three pods and there were separate pods for nearby Urban Portland, Washington County and Clackamas County. Southern Oregon had two lively tasting pods and Eastern Oregon and the Columbia Gorge rounded out the state map with one pod each. In addition there were food carts and a photo booth and the event also benefited a good cause as $5 of every ticket went to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
With over 40 boutique wineries and 2 to 5 grape varietals at each winery there were 150 bottles for your tasting pleasure. We decided we needed a strategy to tackle this massive tasting. We opted to forego anything that was relatively local to Portland since we had tasted several of the producers already and figured if we missed some local ones it would be easier to visit them in the future. That decision shifted our focus to the wineries of Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon and the Columbia Gorge. It was still a huge amount of wines to taste but we were excited to give it a go. We further decided to split our tastings between the two of us and to use the dump bucket if the wine didn’t appeal favorably to us and we were also glad that the event offered free Uber rides home – just in case.
Pour Oregon is put on by Cellar 503 Wine Club which is the brainchild of Carrie Wynkoop and a fantastic way to get to know Oregon wines – https://www.cellar503.com/ While a typical wine club is focused on the wines of a single producer the brilliant vision that Ms. Wynkoop had was to create a wine club focusing on small production wineries from all over the state of Oregon. Hence the “503” reference in the club name since when the USA dialing numbering plan was created in 1947 the “503” area code covered the entire state of Oregon. And Cellar 503 does the same with wines they ship to club members – small producers (under 10,000 cases) from all over the state are represented in the monthly or quarterly wine shipments.
Living in Portland it is easy to fall into a habit of buying and tasting Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs. While quaffing WV Pinot is quite a lovely habit to fall into, when you attend Pour Oregon or join the Cellar 503 Wine Club you learn that Oregon has so much more to offer in terms of grape varietals and growing conditions. So add a little variety to your life and expand your wine drinking horizon to include other grapes and wine regions in Oregon – get out of that Pinot rut and try the wines and visit the vineyards of Umpqua Valley, Applegate Valley, Rogue Valley and the Columbia Gorge.
Since we intentionally focused on wines outside of the Willamette Valley we tasted quite a bit of the diversity that Oregon has to offer. Pinot Noirs are available from these other areas including a white Pinot Noir (just remove the skins right away and you have white Pinot Noir) but beyond Pinot there was amazing variety of wine types. We tasted fabulous Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese varietals and unique red blends mixing Rhone and Bordeaux varietals together or Super Tuscans blending Italian varietals and French varietals. And on the white wine side beyond the Oregon standards of Pinot Gris and Chardonnay we tasted some lovely Chenin Blanc, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Albariño, and Grüner Veltliner whites.
At Pour Oregon you can buy what you taste right at the event.
Winemakers hamming it up at the photo booth before the crowds arrive.
You’ll have to wait until next year to attend Pour Oregon but in the mean time you can attend monthly tastings at Cellar 503’s tasting room in Portland https://www.cellar503.com/sip-503/ or join the club and start tasting and learning about the amazing diversity of Oregon wines.